A Hungarian police van passes by an intelligent fence post as it patrols the fortified Hungary-Serbia border near the village of Asotthalom, Hungary March 2, 2017. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh

(Reuters) - The Hungarian parliament approved on Tuesday measures to tighten border controls and put migrants in camps along its border, the state news agency MTI reported.

Hungary plans two or three camps along its southern border, where migrants will be kept while their applications for asylum are processed, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said last month.

Migrants whose applications are not immediately approved will not be allowed to move freely around Hungary but will be detained in the camps, Lajos Kosa, the parliamentary group leader of Orban’s Fidesz party, said earlier last month.

Hungary has been a focal point of Europe’s migration crisis, with hundreds of thousands passing through in 2015 in often chaotic scenes on the frontier with Serbia - the external border of the EU’s passport-free Schengen area - and a Budapest rail terminus.